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The linked article -- and others I've read on this topic -- suggest that it's actually a big bump in revenue, which is the source of the problem. The article qu
by chipotle_coyote 7y ago
The linked article -- and others I've read on this topic -- suggest that it's actually a big bump in revenue, which is the source of the problem. The article quoted Outbrain's deal with Time Magazine as bringing in $100M, and while that may be an outlier, it suggests that bringing in millions of dollars with these chumboxes isn't at all out of the question. If your magazine/news site has been seeing its revenue steadily decreasing over the past decade, you've been through two rounds of layoffs, and Taboola comes along and says, "Hey, we can help you bring in an extra five million a year"...
- criddell 7y ago$100M sounds like a lot of money, but that's over 3 years. So $33.3M per year or roughly $2.8 million per month. Time claims to see 65 million unique visitors per month so that works out to less than a nickle per unique user every month. I'm paying Google Fi $10 / gigabyte for bandwidth on my phone. If the images and javascript in an Outbrain ad are more than 5 MB, then I'm paying more for the bandwidth than Time is getting to show me that. I wish I could just pay Time sixty cents per year and not have to see those ads.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoI see what you're saying, but the flip side is that in absolute terms rather than "revenue per unique user," over $30M a year is, well, over $30M a year. In 2016, Time Inc's net profit was under $20M a quarter -- that's not Time Magazine, that's the whole company. If you're in that position, bringing in another $7.5M a year for letting somebody put crappy ads at the bottom of your articles could be awfully tempting.